Feb 19, 2015

Elon Musk, And the Race to Control the Race for Mars (And Insure It)…

.,. and while we're on the subject of space commericalization, "space Bilderbergers," astronauts and cosmonauts in Jedi Knights costumery, Death Stars, and Mars, ponder this article that was shared by Mr. S.D. carefully:

Mr. Musk clearly wants to be on Mars, permanently, and soon. But I hope you caught something that caught my eye when I read this article, and weren't distracted by diagrams of big rocket boosters, stories of reusable boosters, building and testing craft for the journey to Mars, and so on. What really caught my eye was one rather short little statement:

"Elon Musk and his new investors (Google and Fidelity) were planning to create a lower altitude network of thousands of satellites for high speed internet service. The plan is to create a global internet service that could help fund the city on Mars. Spacex satellite network would have up to 4000 smaller mass produced satellites that would fly at about 700 kilometers for faster response and communication speeds."

Now, doing a little dot-connecting here, this means that Google, with all its ties to the NSA, and Fidelity, are major stakeholders in Mr Musk's space enterprises, and therefore, major stakeholders in his Mars ambitions. And thus, an implication (and some of our trademark high octane speculation) immediately follows. Assume, for a moment, that Mr. Musk and his corporation are successful in getting to Mars, and establishing a permanent human colony there. What will they find or discover? Answer: we probably won't be told, other than in very vague terms, for two very simple reasons: (1) it will become somehow a proprietary secret of the corporation, and (2) because of the NSA's indirect involvement via Google, for "national security" reasons. Corporate and government security is a pretty thick veil to pierce.

But there is, in my high octane speculative opinion, and even more intriguing implication in the above statement, and that is the fact that Fidelity is a major stakeholder in Musk's space enterprises. Fidelity is, of course, one of America's and the world's largest investment firms; mutual funds, financial management, retirement investments, and so on, are its stock in trade.

But so is something else: insurance, which is to say, risk reduction. This is a clear sign, in other words, that we are looking at the commercialization of space right now, for real, and in addition to this, we're looking at the standard Veneto-Western model of investment and risk management at work: the bankrollers and insurers get together to fund a risky project: the funding of a few galleys to go trade for some spices in the risky waters of the eastern Mediterranean, for a stake in the profits of what's brought back, but should the whole thing run afoul of solar storms or intergalactic Saracens, there's always the insurance to fall back on...

And that too, raises its own problematic implications. Insurance companies have to be large enough to insure such a venture. A one trillion dollar policy, in case something goes wrong, implies a financial system with hidden financial resources far beyond what has been publicly disclosed (and that brings us right back to one of my favorite hypotheses, namely, that such a system has secretly been in place at least since 1947, if not shortly before). And underwriting policies for something this risky implies yet something else: actuarial tables. How would one go about compiling the actuarial tables for such a venture. Large and powerful insurance firms like Lloyds or Fidelity obvious have the wherewithal to hire the mathematicians to compile and model such things, but ultimately, actuarial tables are compiled from a long history of actual results and tested against them.
So the question becomes, where did that putative historical database come from...? And with that, we're back at Google, and the NSA... It does make one wonder....